Verdun spent a century with its back to the river and a highway-era plan to wall it off; in the last decade it turned around to face the water and became, briefly and loudly, the street everyone wanted to live on. This walk does both halves — the comeback high street and the riverbank that drives it.
Start on Rue Wellington, the long commercial spine a magazine ranked the coolest street on earth, which is the kind of claim that ages badly but the cafés and independent shops underneath it are genuinely the neighbourhood's own. Walk south-west past the old market block, then cut down through the residential grid to the St Lawrence.
The Plage de Verdun is the surprise: a real urban beach, opened in 2019, where you can swim in the river in the middle of the city. From there the boardwalk runs east — herons, joggers, the rapids breaking white, Nuns' Island low across the channel. End at the floating dock, out over the water on its red rails, then a few blocks inland to Verdun station.
